Stop Reading This and Go Build Your Own Board Game

Jordan Goddard is a first-time board game designer from Carmel, Ind. Together with his partner, Mandy Moulin, he recently created and received Kickstarter backing for Collapse, a post-apocalyptic card game. Goddard tells Popular Mechanics why it's never been easier to build your own game and walks you through the steps.

How did you and Mandy come up with Collapse, and what convinced you that you could design and build your own game?

It just seemed like something that would be a lot of fun. We play a lot of games with our friends, and I'm really interested in art and mathematics, both of which are big components of game design.

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But what convinced us we could do it ourselves was that not only is it tremendously easy to make games nowadays, but there's just not a high barrier to entry. You can grab free design software online, and where you used to have to pay somebody $10,000 to make a mold for a custom gamepiece, you can now get one printed for $5 online. It's ridiculously cheap. We learned that if we wanted to get a full-color 300-card set for our custom game sent from China, it would cost literally $7. So there was just not enough standing in our way to not pursue making this game.

Tell us a little about your game.

For Collapse, we had a couple of different ideas, but in the end we decided on one that melds the theme of our game (preparing for the end of the world) with a game mechanic that really makes that theme come alive. Our key game mechanic is something called deck building, which is where everybody starts with a deck of cards, and on every turn you buy more cards from a central play area to add to your deck. And you have to make difficult decisions based on what you can carry. It really does feel like you're trying to hoard a post-apocalyptic stockpile.

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How'd you know your first game would be, well, good?

Here's the thing: Game-making is not necessarily difficult. The biggest judge of whether your game is good' or not is this: At the end of your game, do you want to play again? That's a really easy question to ask and answer. Just give it to your friends, and see if they ask to play it again. So we just kept play-testing Collapse, changing it, and going though iteration after iteration until, yeah, it was honestly really, really fun and we'd want to play again after we'd finished.

For anyone reading this interview who wants to make their own first board game, what's step one?

Step one is definitely prototyping your game immediately. Once you come up with a very basic idea, just get some blank pieces of paper, some cheap note cards, and start to build a bare-bones working prototype. It'll take something like 30 minutes. At this phase, don't worry about graphics or anything like that.

Once you have your first incarnation of your game, it'll take about three minutes for you to realize what you have is terrible. And it will be terribleyour brain just doesn't have the practice to know how a game comes together until you physically play it. But when you start playing your prototype, you can start identifying the things that aren't working and then you can fix them, and play it again.

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Then, after a week of improvement, you can show it to some friends. They'll tell you it's terribleand, yes, it still is. But you take their input and just keep improving your game. You shouldn't be disheartened or intimidated; no one's game is ever good at first. But before you know it, through sheer persistence, your game will start to come together.

How does a first-time game designer ensure their game has the right balance?

Yes, so there's tons of math involved in trying to balance your board gameand if that's your thing, you can certainly live inside an excel spreadsheet. But if you just keep play-testing your game, then you often come to the same conclusion as [you would have if you] had done all the calculations.

What makes a lot of games interesting are their imperfectionstheir rough edges. A certain element of chance or luck is greatalthough you never want a player to feel like they don't have an opportunity, through skill or will, to win.

And there are also really easy ways to build balance into a game. Whenever you increase player interaction, for example, turning a dice roll into a bargaining or bidding, you're adding balance.

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Once you have the concept down, how do you turn it into the real thing, with art, game pieces, and everything else?

Although it may not seem like it, this is the easiest part of the process. There are plenty of places you can get free design software to lay out your board game, and there are several websites where putting together your game for printing is just a matter of uploading your design and the jpeg images of your art. And you can get your game printed for something like $7 to 25 per unitor much, much cheaper if you print a large number. As for getting custom game pieces, 3D printing has really revolutionized the process. If you just look at what's available on websites like Shapeways, it's really mind-blowing.

As for obtaining the art for your cards, or board, or box, or what have you, that's just a matter of hiring an artist to make images for you. Personally, I'd suggest trying to find a forum where artists are sharing work with one another, and trying to hire someone there. Not only do you build a relationship with the artist, it's also the cheapest option.

If you had to design Collapse all over again, were there things you would have done differently?

One big lesson: Don't get the art designed too soon. It should be the last thing you do. We have several hundred dollars of art that we'll never use because we made changes to the game after we'd contracted an artist.

When you're play-testing your game, don't keep it to yourself for too long. There's a huge community of board gamers you can find on places like Reddit or BoardGameGeek.com who love new designersand there are hundreds of people that will jump on the opportunity to print and play-test your game, and then give you feedback for free, so take advantage of that!

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